I both loved and loathed Romeo Castellucci's Giulio Cesare at the last London International Festival of Theatre, but even if his three-and-a-half-hour Genesi, which closes the current festival, provokes occasional ennui or outrage, it is nevertheless visually arresting.
After a week of suffocating Americana, it is refreshing to encounter a distinctively European sensibility, one that uses the stage with remarkable imaginative freedom.
In no way is this a literal reading of the Biblical Genesis. It's more like a hallucinatory triptych that reminds me of Cardinal Newman's description of the creation as "a vast aboriginal calamity".
Initially juxtaposing Marie Curie, who discovered radium, and a Torah-quoting Lucifer, it proceeds to evoke the origins of mankind.
The awakening Adam is a bone-crunching contortionist. Eve is a flesh-sagging middle-aged woman with a mastectomy. A toy snake slithers across the ground. Mechanical sheep copulate in a Damien Hirst-style glass case and the air is filled, in Scott Gibbon's score, with a thunderous quasi-industrial hammering.
What does it all mean? Castellucci suggests that creation and chaos are closely allied and that the Tree of Knowledge leads eventually both to nuclear physics - hence Curie - and to Auschwitz, which is the title of the second section. I expected to detest this, since the theatre can add nothing to documented reality.
But Castellucci unexpectedly cuts through one's defences by reminding us that children were the first to be gassed. He evokes a white world of children's play behind billowing muslin, using horribly suggestive imagery such as showers and toy trains.
It is a world of imminent rather than actual evil, and it brings to mind Theodor Adorno's famous dictum "No poetry after Auschwitz". No childhood innocence either, implies Castellucci.
After this, the third section, Abel and Cain, is slightly anti-climactic. It focuses less on the murder than on a post-fratricidal tristesse, with a naked Cain lying on top of his murdered brother's body while dogs prowl the stage to the accompaniment of an elegiac Gorecki score.
What the work means in total is almost impossible to say. But Castellucci uses the stage like a painter to suggest that the abundance of the natural universe contains within itself the seeds of its own termination: that God is both creator and destroyer.
Castellucci may not be an original thinker, but he is undeniably an artist - one who offers a salutary reminder of the theatre's largely untapped imaginative potential.
Until July 7. Box office: 020 7863 8000.
Sadler's Wells
